The Irish Potato Famine

In the 1840s about eight million people lived in Ireland. Most of them were very poor. They did not own their land. They rented a small piece of land from a landlord, and many landlords lived in England and never saw their fields. If a family could not pay the rent, the family could be put off the land. When a farmer died, the land was divided between his sons. Then it was divided again. So the pieces of land became smaller and smaller. Many families had only one or two acres. On a piece of land that small, only one plant could feed everybody.

That plant was the potato. It came to Ireland from the Americas long before, and by the 1840s it fed about a third of the country. There were good reasons for this. Potatoes grew well in poor, wet ground. One small field gave much more food than the same field of wheat. Potatoes needed no machines. A family could eat potatoes all year, with a little milk, and stay strong and healthy. One acre was enough. So potatoes were grown in every corner of the country, and one kind, called the Lumper, was grown most of all.

This worked for many years. But it was dangerous, and some people could see the danger. The potato crop had failed before in small ways, and once very badly in the 1740s. Government reports in the 1830s said that great numbers of country people had no regular work and not enough food. Not much was done. Ireland was not the same everywhere. In the north-east, near Belfast, many families also made linen, so they had a second income. In the west and the south, there was nothing else. Everything there waited on one harvest each autumn.

In 1845 a disease came to Ireland on ships from North America. People call it the blight. First there was a sweet, bad smell over the fields. Then the leaves turned black. Then farmers opened the ground and found potatoes that had rotted into black water. Nobody knew what caused it. Between a third and a half of the crop was lost in 1845. In 1846 almost all of it was lost. In 1847 there was very little seed to plant, so the harvest was tiny. People still call that year Black '47. In 1848 the blight came back again.

Ireland was ruled from London. The first government bought maize from America and sold it cheaply, and that helped a little. The next government thought that a government should not interfere with trade, and should not simply give food away. So work was given instead of food. Hungry men were sent out in winter to break stones and build roads that went nowhere, and the wages were too low to buy enough food. Later, soup kitchens were opened. For a few months in 1847 about three million people were fed every day. Then the soup kitchens were closed again.

There was also a hard rule, the "quarter-acre" rule. A family with more than a quarter of an acre of land could get no help. So people had to give up their land before they could be fed. Very many families were evicted, and their little houses were pulled down behind them. Fever spread in the crowded buildings and on the roads, and disease killed as many people as hunger did. And all this time other food was leaving the country. Grain, butter and animals were sent out of Irish ports while people starved a few miles away.

People left. About a million people died in these years, and about another million emigrated. Some landlords paid for the tickets, because they wanted empty land. Other families were sent money by relatives who had gone before them. The cheapest ships crossed to Canada. They were crowded and dirty, fever travelled with the passengers, and later people called them "coffin ships". Many died at sea or soon after they arrived. Others went to Liverpool, Glasgow, Boston and New York. By 1851 about six and a half million people were left in Ireland, and the number went down for another hundred years.

The people who left took the story with them. Today there are families of Irish blood all over the world — in the United States, in Canada, in Britain, in Australia — and many of them still know the town or the county their family came from. In America the memory stayed strong and angry, and money was sent back across the Atlantic for Irish politics for many years. Ireland changed at home too. Land was no longer divided into tiny pieces. In the west, the Irish language was lost in many places. The anger was passed down in families, in songs and in speeches.

People still argue about the word. Some say "famine" is too soft, because there was food in the country and it was sent away; they use much harder words. Most historians do not accept the hardest word, "genocide", because that means a plan to kill a people, and they see bad ideas, slow decisions and neglect instead. Many now say this: nature started it, and government made it far worse. In 1997 a British Prime Minister said that the government of the time had failed the Irish people. And one old question is still here today: much of the world's food still comes from very few plants.